Schafer v. Time, Inc., 96-8730
| Decision Date | 08 June 1998 |
| Docket Number | No. 96-8730,96-8730 |
| Citation | 142 F.3d 1361 |
| Parties | 49 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 911, 26 Media L. Rep. 1897, 11 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. C 1448 Michael SCHAFER, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. TIME, INC., Defendant-Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit |
Dennis John Webb, Douglas Allen Wilde, Marvin Dewayne Dikeman, Webb, Carlock, Copeland, Semler & Stair, Atlanta, GA, for Plaintiff-Appellant.
Sean R. Smith, Thomas M. Clyde, Peter C. Canfield, Dow, Lohnes & Albertson, Atlanta, GA, for Defendant-Appellee.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.
Before TJOFLAT, BIRCH and MARCUS *, Circuit Judges.
This diversity case requires us to parse the often conflicting and confusing concepts of malice as they have evolved in Georgia's libel laws. After instructing the jury on the applicable law and receiving a subsequent request to define "malicious defamation," the district court instructed the jury that before the plaintiff-appellant could recover for libel he had to show that the defendant-appellee made a "statement deliberately calculated to injure." We REVERSE the district court on this issue and REMAND this case for a new trial.
This appeal also presents a number of evidentiary questions, most notably whether specific instances of misconduct are admissible to prove character under Federal Rule of Evidence 405(b) in an action for libel under Georgia law. The plaintiff-appellant challenges the district court's decision to admit character evidence pursuant to Rule 405(b), as well as its decision to exclude evidence under Federal Rule of Evidence 403 on the grounds that its prejudicial effect substantially outweighed its relevance. Although these evidentiary issues are not dispositive given our decision to reverse the district court on the grounds mentioned above, they may well arise at a second trial. Accordingly, we discuss these and a number of additional questions raised in the parties' briefs in an effort to guide the district court and the parties at retrial.
On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded in mid-flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, causing the death of everyone on board. A terrorist's bomb was then, and is now, widely suspected to be the source of that explosion. On April 20, 1992, defendant-appellee, Time, Inc. ("Time"), published a cover story entitled "The Untold Story of Pan Am 103." The article purported to debunk the then-prevailing theory that the government of Lybia had sponsored the attack on Pan Am 103. Instead, the article posited that a Palestinian group, with connections to Syrian drug traffickers, had targeted Pan Am 103 to eliminate several of the passengers who were members of a United States counter terrorism team attempting to rescue United States hostages in Lebanon. The article claims that these passengers had discovered an unsavory, covert relationship between the Syrian drug traffickers and a unit of the United States Central Intelligence Agency and intended to expose it upon their return to the United States.
The article further stated that an American agent, David Lovejoy, had become a double agent and had leaked information regarding the team's travel plans to forces hostile to the United States. The article included a photograph of a man identified by the following caption:
David Lovejoy, a reported double agent for the U.S. and Iran, is alleged to have told Iranian officials that McKee [one of the U.S. agents] was booked on Flight 103.
See Schafer R. Excerpt 1, Exh. A at 31. The article went on to imply that the information Lovejoy disclosed to hostile forces led to the attack on Pan Am 103.
The photograph in question apparently became associated with the Pam Am 103 bombing in connection with a civil case filed by the families of the Pan Am 103 victims. The families' law suit claimed that Pan Am had failed to take adequate security precautions to prevent the bombing. One of Pan Am's lawyers in that case, James Shaughnessy, filed a sworn affidavit that contained a variety of assertions about the attack that he hoped to explore through discovery in the Pan Am litigation. Shaughnessy's affidavit alleged that unnamed sources had identified Lovejoy, the double agent whose treachery facilitated the attack on Pan Am 103, as the man in an attached photograph. The man in the photograph, however, is Michael Schafer, the plaintiff-appellant in this case. Time's article, therefore, erroneously identified Schafer, then working in his family's janitorial business in Austell, Georgia, both as a traitor to the United States government and a player in the bombing of Pan Am 103. 1
Upon discovering his picture in the magazine, Schafer demanded and eventually received a retraction from Time. Schafer filed suit against Time, making claims under Georgia's libel laws. A jury returned a verdict in Time's favor, finding no liability for the error. After filing a motion for a new trial, which the district court denied, Schafer filed this timely appeal. Schafer challenges a number of the district court's evidentiary rulings as well as the court's recharge to the jury on the definition of "malicious" under Georgia's libel statute. He also challenges both the district court's refusal to instruct the jury that the republication of a libelous depiction constitutes libel under Georgia law and the court's decision not to charge the jury on Georgia's retraction statute.
After trial, the court instructed the jury on the elements of libel under Georgia law. The instructions included a recitation of Georgia's statutory definition of libel:
[A] libel is a false and malicious defamation of another expressed in print, writing, pictures or signs, tending to injure the reputation of the person and exposing him to public hatred, contempt or ridicule.
R26 at 1534 (quoting O.C.G.A. § 51-5-1(a)) (emphasis added). The instructions proceeded to explain the various elements of libel and correctly instructed the jury that it need find, by a preponderance of the evidence, only that Time failed to exercise ordinary care in ascertaining whether the information it published was true or false before it could find in Schafer's favor.
After describing these elements, the district court instructed the jury on the plaintiff's claims for compensatory and punitive damages. One of Schafer's theories for compensatory damages allowed the jury to presume damages but required a clear and convincing showing of "actual malice." The court instructed the jury that:
A publication is made with actual malice if it is made with knowledge that it is false or with reckless disregard of whether it is false or not. In order to demonstrate actual malice, the plaintiff must demonstrate more than just negligence by a preponderance of the evidence. He must prove by clear and convincing evidence that the challenged libel was made by the defendant with knowledge that such statements were false or that the defendant acted with reckless disregard of their falsity. Reckless disregard is a high degree of defendant's awareness of the probable falsity of the statements made.
Id. at 1539. The court also instructed the jury that it could not award punitive damages against Time unless it found "actual malice" as defined above.
The instructions, therefore, referred to the concept of malice in two different contexts: first, to describe the character of the defamatory statement and, second, to describe the lack of care the defendant employed in ascertaining the truth of the statement at issue. Consequently, the jury found itself in some confusion as to the use of malice in the instructions and asked the trial court to explain its use in Georgia's statutory definition of libel. The district court answered the jury by attempting to distinguish a "malicious statement" from the concept of "actual malice" as it appeared in the instructions on damages.
Malicious, as used in this particular paragraph ..., is not the same as the term actual malice, which is defined for you in connection with Mr. Schafer's claim that injury to his reputation should be presumed. Instead, as used here, it, along with the word false that precedes it, describes the character of a defamation that is libelous. It denotes statements deliberately calculated to injure. In all actions for defamation, this type of malice may be inferred from the character of the charge but it may be rebutted by proof.
Id. at 1569-70 (emphasis added). After receiving this instruction, the jury resumed its deliberations and returned a verdict within the hour, deciding that Time was not liable to Schafer for libel. Schafer contends that the district court's re-charge, particularly the phrase "deliberately calculated to injure," misled the jury by improperly requiring them to find that Time actually intended to injure Schafer by publishing the photograph in order to find liability. 2
The trial court took the wording of its recharge to the jury directly from our decision in Straw v. Chase Revel, Inc., 813 F.2d 356 (11th Cir.1987). In that case, we examined the issue of punitive damages awarded for a defendant's violation of Georgia's libel laws and noted that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibited the award of punitive damages in a defamation case absent a showing of "actual malice." Id. at 360-63 (). In that context, we undertook to explain the difference between "actual malice" as defined in the Supreme Court's cases and "common law malice" as it appears in section 51-5-1. Id. We explained that "actual malice" referred to the speaker's actual or constructive knowledge regarding the truth of the statement. 3 We then explained that "maliciou...
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